Semiconductor industry relies on device scaling to deliver improved performance at lower costs. Flash memory is the mainstream non-volatile memory in today's market. However, Flash memory has a number of limitations that is posing a significant threat to continued advancement of memory technology. Therefore, the industry is exploring alternative memories to replace Flash memory. Contenders for future memory technology include magnetic storage random access memory (MRAM), ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM), and resistive switching memories such as phase change RAM (PCRAM), metal oxide based memories, and ionic memories such as conductive bridging random access memory (CBRAM) or programmable metallization cell (PMC) memory. These memories are also called as emerging memories.
To be viable, the emerging memory has to be better than Flash memory in more than one technology metrics such as scalability, performance, energy efficiency, On/Off ratio, operational temperature, CMOS compatibility, and reliability. Further, the emerging memory has to have a cost advantage or at least not be prohibitively expensive. However, production costs depend on many factors such as process yield, which may be significantly increase manufacturing costs.